Okafor Exemplifies Concept of 'Student-Athlete'

UConn center is the best player in college basketball, an academic All-American and now a national champion.

Emeka Okafor holds up a piece of the net after UConn's win over Georgia Tech.

April 6, 2004

By JIM LITKEAP Sports Columnist

SAN ANTONIO (AP) - The parents knew little about basketball, and cared even
less.

Pius Okafor took his 8-year-old son, Emeka, to his first rec league game in
Bartlesville, Okla., mostly because other kids played, too. Besides, he thought
the fast-growing boy needed to burn some energy.

Although Pius struggled to follow the action at times, by the third game
even he sensed his son had a gift. But he didn't leave war-ravaged Nigeria
behind, and work night and day in his new homeland, just to raise a basketball
player. Pius and his wife, Celestina, had much grander plans.

"I made him understand academics went first," she said. "He would go to
school, come home, take a nap, go play and study again. ... We had rules."

Thirteen years later, Emeka Okafor is the best player in college basketball,
an academic All-American, and after Monday night, a national champion to boot.
He will graduate from Connecticut with a 3.8 grade-point average and a degree
in finance in just three years. Then he will take his brains and brawn to the
NBA and become an instant millionaire.

As confetti swirled and the celebration of UConn's title continued on every
side of him, coach Jim Calhoun looked back to where Okafor stood in a gaggle of
his teammates, waiting for his chance to cut down a strand of the net.

"He's an advertisement," Calhoun said, "for why every kid should go to
college."

The story of how Okafor wound up at a powerhouse like UConn has more to do
with luck than basketball prowess. At the end of his four years at Bellaire
High in Houston, Emeka was still a better student than athlete.

His top college choices were academic powerhouses like Stanford, Vanderbilt
and Rice, but none of them had a scholarship to offer. Like a lot of coaches,
Bob Knight thought enough of Okafor's potential to make a side trip to Houston
the day after he got the Texas Tech job. Calhoun saw the same qualities and
started recruiting the kid hard, but their first meeting didn't go smoothly.

The coach's heavy New England accent was tough for Okafor to decipher, and
he had trouble following the fast-talking Irishman's pitch. Calhoun, meanwhile,
was puzzled by a game the father and son played while he sat in their living
room.

"It took me a couple of minutes to figure out," Calhoun said. "They were
competing in a game where they're naming streets, from all over the world, I
think, and then spelling them, rapid-fire. His father is just like him."

"Competitive," teammate Rashad Anderson said, finishing the thought.
"Other than me, Emeka is the most competitive guy I've ever known. The one
thing I do better than him is shoot 3-pointers and we've spent hours after
practice going back and forth until he wins at least one.

Whatever the source, the rest of the college basketball world never quite
found a way to cope. Okafor began drawing attention in the middle of last
season, becoming faster and stronger as the games marched on, and by tournament
time, he was arguably the most dominant force in the sport.

But his progress this season wasn't an unbroken line. Like UConn, he began
it saddled with expectations and then was hampered by back problems. With
Okafor struggling, the Huskies lost to Georgia Tech in the Preseason NIT, and
by the end of January, despite stringing together a 17-3 mark, he and his team
were labeled disappointing. Then they closed it out with a 14-1 run.

"It was kind of stressful at points, but we just stayed with it and
prevailed," Okafor said.

Georgia Tech center Luke Schenscher knew only too well how that felt,

"He's a great player. We knew that coming in," Schenscher said after
battling Okafor in the post all night. "We tried a few things defensively, but
he had his way with us."

Okafor has been doing that with just about everybody he's come in contact
with since childhood. Those he couldn't overpower, he simply charmed.

"We always knew he'd be good at something, but who would have dreamed it
would be basketball?" his father said. "I remember when he was in the ninth
grade at some tournament or other, and afterward, he was signing autographs for
all these kids who weren't much younger than him."

Then the elder Okafor looked back at the court, trying to find his son in
the middle of the chaos.

"Athletics were not very important growing up back home. We let Emeka
continue on with it, because it made him happy. But who," he said, with a
sweep of his arm, "could imagine it would lead to this?"

With that, Pius Okafor rubbed his chin, took in the scene before him again
and flashed a grin that seemed to say, "Only in America."